September 17, 2007

TechCrunch40 Kick-Off

The TechCrunch40 event in San Francisco is underway. So far, it's more than I expected, meaning that for their first year out of the gate, they have managed to pull together a group of high-profile sponsors (including VCs) and a stellar list of start-ups across a variety of industry sectors. And instead of 400 folks on-site, they sold out and have a packed main room with close to 1,000 attendees.

One morning panel brought in co-founders of Yahoo, Netscape, and YouTube while another went through the pitch, vote and comment model. I walked in when the CEO of Yap was talking about Dragon and IBM Via Voice which threw me - "am I in the right decade? the right conference?"

My old world and new world collides today. Then a reference to former client VoiceSignal who was recently acquired by Nuance was raised by someone on the far right of the panel and I thought - 'is speech rec buzz is back?"

And then there was PowerSet's PR team who was handing out viles of vodka and juice. While it looked more like window cleaner, it actually tasted pretty good. More from the ground coming.

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How many of those 1,000 people that packed the room were given free tickets by organizers to make it look more successful? How do you think that made people feel who had to pay $3K for a ticket and then have to fight for seat space?

Frankly, I don't think they needed to make it look more successful. They had stellar sponsors and attendees....they managed to get the founder of Netscape, YouTube and Yahoo on stage to talk about their early beginnings, a panel largely found at only the highest profile conferences in the industry. They were only shooting for 400, ended up with close to 1,000 and were still sold out.